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Current update is this: I took a break from gamedev that i will probably finish in december. I made a proper list with changes and stuff that so far has 26 entries. I want to make a longer video with much slower movement setting. And i want to talk over the video to explain things. I only post updates on youtube and twitter. Thanks for your thoughts! :3

@nbohr1more This is exactly one good reason to keep your distance to thief. I cannot fulfill the needs of the thief community so from the beginning there was a clear statement in my mind that i would do my own thing. I am working on this alone mostly but i have a thief veteran at my side who made fan missions himself. Together we talk about alot issues and we take into account posts people make on different forums. Your suggestions on tdm are directly influencing my game, so keep making them, they are heard by me aswell! Also i take my main inspiration from popular thief 2 fan missions. Keeper of infinity, Rocksbourg, Calendra, Vanishing Point, Rose Cottage, A better tomorrow and other ones i just forgot. Also i would like to go a more open dark route with my storyline and world, something akin to john wick, sin city and the witcher 1. As long as it fits the story and is in reason i would like to show it. Wish me luck i am gonna need it.

I know a lot of people here like lovecraftian horror, so you probably have heard about the game "The Sinking City". I had it on my radar for quite some time, but I recently learned that it had been removed from the Steam-store and I only now found out why. There was a statement by the dev studio Frogwares describing how their publisher BigBen/Nacon basically tried to rob them of their interlectual property and owes the studio more than 1 million € in royalties and also a couple of months of contract payments for development milestones. This in the end lead to Frogwares having to pull the game from quite a few major stores. This story shows once again how publishers can be utter capitalist evil... I usually wait until games are cheaper, but after reading this, I want to show my support, so I am going to get a DRM-free copy from Gamesplanet now. I am also really curious for this game, so I am happy to pay the retail price.

Amazing game to bad it newer got the love it deserved my local copy has a huge amount of bugs fixed, but i can only get so far without the source code.

These are great, but it's kind of a problem for customs assets to be spread out among links buried in threads. I don't need these now, but maybe I will in 6 months, and then I worry it's going to be hard to find what I saw before again. One solution I mentioned before is that an FM be made that basically collects all the custom assets from every source into one place, where the player can just go in and it can be basically laid out like an Ikea store, lol. But you can look around and see what you might want, and it should have a title plate with the author & name of the asset, so you can just grab it out of the pk4 ready to drop in an FM and use right away. And then being able to download it from inside the game would probably be the best way for people to find it. The only issue is, somebody would have to volunteer to make it. I might be able to do it if no one else volunteers. I think it might even encourage players to think about being mappers. And it might be fun to throw in a little gameplay (like a scavenger hunt) for good measure, and if it's made for mappers, it would be good to go ahead and throw in mapping tutorials and example areas (e.g., complex systems like elevators, or that great tutorial about visportaling converted to actual map area, etc.) that people can grab and throw in their FM. What do people think?

A while back, I suggested that we add a "playlist" option to TDM. That way players can string missions together themselves rather than requiring mappers to pack them together. This would also allow players to share playlists of (for example) favorite horror missions, etc. At the time the suggestion was met with some push-back about how few missions existed.

Yeah, breakable lockpciks would be really annoying in a game like this. The TDS system was also quite nice. Personally, I prefer a system, where you can do something yourself, so it not only depends on choosing the right lockpick and holding down a button (i.e. the TDP and TMA style). The current bethesda ones are fine, but still not my favourite. Then again: it is you game, so you choose what you think is best I understand the frustration people had with the system, but I liked that it quite realistically showed what happens, when picking a lock. And if you got some expereince with it, you could pick locks that were far above your current level (still used quicksave spamming a lot). I imagine that this system without breakable lockpicks and no time limit could be fun.

I studied alot of lockpicking systems and decided that even with all my skill it would be better to take a simple one from the Marketplace and enhance it. I took a bethesda inspired one and added bolt levels to it and removed the pin breaking. I have some basic issues with it but the overall result is: It has to be simple. This feature is a core feature so you dont want to make it a large complicated effort. I just hate the system in thief 1 and 2. They are just clunky and horrible. Thief 3 was super fast and had levels... That was properly done.

UE3 source code was never released, because it consisted of too many third-party subsystems. It was a licensing mess, unfortunately. It's amazing though, that now you can whip up a high quality prototype in a few months all by yourself.

This looks fantastic! How many of those assets are part of the UE4 package? I think we historically had sour grapes about Unreal Engine based attempts at a Thief clone since many players have repeatedly asked "Why didn't you wait for UE3?" or "When are you going to migrate to UE3?" etc. In hindsight it's quite clear why these questions are even more absurd than they were back in 2009... It wasn't until 2015 when UE4 source code was made available to the community (UE3 never released the source during it's tenure), so nobody could have made a lightgem system or any of the advanced AI systems needed until then. Did players in 2009 want to wait until at least 2018 to have a playable game in Unreal Engine?, ...or was it better that by 2018 we had TDM 2.06 64-bit with real-time soft-shadows, EFX audio, and over 120 missions including monster sized missions like Behind Closed Doors, commercial quality missions like the William Steele series, Shadow Cursed series, and Volta series... etc. (Eg. We had the banquet on the table already.)

I like the look and feel of it. Good luck with your project! We're not ones to tell anyone they can't do what they like. TDM actually got a lot of hate from the original Thief crowd at TTLG for being inauthentic, kind of bewildering to some of us at the time, but in the end most people realize there's room for different projects and visions and life is too short not to do what you want. It seems like every year or two, someone is presenting their own vision of this genre and will post a video here, which is cool. They often have new ideas or cool takes on different things, and this one is better than a lot of others. And if you're making a game the way you like it, chances are there will be others that like those things too.